From Hendaye one may enter Spain by any one of three means of communication,—by railway, on foot across the Pont de Béhobie, or by a boat across the Bidassoa. The first means is the most frequented; for a piécette—that is to say a pièce blanche of Spanish money, which has the weight and appearance of a franc, but a considerably reduced value—one can cross by train; a boatman will take you for half the price at any time of the day or night; and by the Pont International, it costs nothing.
The Frontier at Hendaye
This international bridge belongs half to France and half to Spain, the post in the middle bearing the respective arms marking the limits of the territorial rights of each.
This is one of the most curiously ordained frontiers in all the world. The people of Urrugne in France, twenty kilometres distant from the frontier, can hold speech freely in their mother tongue with those of Feuntarrabia in Spain, but officialdom of the customs and railway organizations at Hendaye and Irun, next-door neighbours, have to translate their speech from French to Spanish and vice versa, or have an interpreter who will. Curious anomaly this!
Hendaye’s chief shrine is a modern one, the singularly-built house, on a rock dominating the bay, formerly inhabited by Pierre Loti, though most of his fellow townsmen knew him only as Julian Viaud, Lieutenant de Vaisseau. This, though the commander of the miserable little gunboat called the “Javelot” stationed always in the Bidassoa was an Académicien.
At the French entrance to this important frontier bridge one reads on a panel PONT INTERNATIONAL; and at the Spanish end, PUENTE INTERNACIONAL; and here the gendarme of France become the carabiniero of Spain.